For reals. Don't use the word, haboob.
From a piece on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog...
It’s the Arabic part of the mix that is driving certain Arizona nativists batty. “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?” one wrote in a letter to the Arizona Republic. “haboob? english please?” wrote another, while still another urged, “were not in india.” (Sic, sic, sic.) Added yet another, sagely, “Haboob comes from a foreign language!”
Making allowance for some of the writers’ seeming unfamiliarity with English in general, we might dust ourselves off and consider that one of the great strengths of our language is its long-standing habit of picking up useful words from wherever they might come. We already use thousands of (now-suspect) borrowings from Arabic, from algebra to zenith, that may not figure in the vocabulary of uneducated speakers, but that do necessary jobs all the same. Haboob has been in general use for generations, alongside another Arabic word, monsoon, and a Spanish one, chubasco.
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